1.Provide personalized acknowledgment. It’s not social media; it’s social media. The individual, no matter how “influential” (or not), deserves to be respected as a human being with value. If you do that, good things happen.- Connect like-minded folks. Evangelists are fueled by meeting other believers. If you connect them with each other, the value of your network grows. There’s actually a mathematical formula that backs this up. It’s called Reed’s Law.
- Understand the core motivation. They aren’t connecting to you because of what you do. As Simon Sinek brilliantly put it, “people don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it.”Figure that out and you’ll be able to give them more of what they want.
- Offer the opportunity to participate. Don’t just offer simple contests; offer real involvement. Dell’s Ideastorm is a classic example here.
- Curate content. Clay Shirky said, “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.” Be the filter for your community about what’s relevant to them and they won’t have to go other places.
- Participate in a relevant way. Going all the way back to the Cluetrain Manifesto, “Markets are conversations.” If you’re at my house and I’m talking about football, you wouldn’t just say, “Hey, when will you buy my product?”
- Offer social proof. Robert Cialdini in his book “Influence” (review) tells us how much we value the opinions of others and how we look for clues in their behavior as to what we should do. Let your community know what others such as them find valuable.
- Provide exclusive experiences. If everybody can do it, it’s not special. When you give your community special access, that builds loyalty, word of mouth and excitement.
- Create unexpected moments. You want your “message” to be remembered, right? Well, the single biggest determinant of whether we recall something later is determined by emotion. And (positive) surprises create emotion … opening the door to help you secure your position in the mind of your community.
- Act with “no strings attached.” Tim Sanders wrote a great book called “Love is the Killer App,” and he is right. What feels better? “I’ll give you X, if you do Y for me” or “here’s X … just because we appreciate you?”
Source: http://smartblogs.com